The persona in Lory Bedikian’s recently published collection of poems, Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), is angry at the world that “has/the nerve to move us from room to room, so far from where we started.” The poems are intense expressions of the longing of the father and the mother for the old country. The trauma of the displacements, the disruptions to their lives caused by wars, and the ache of “each scar/you brought across the Atlantic,” are vividly imagined and recreated. Going back to the “once upon a time” seems to be the only way out of the “hell” of their “new world” but, as the persona well knows, “the search for the beginning is endless.” Things will not improve. Why then does Bedikian, daughter of immigrant parents herself, try to rebuild a story that cannot be rebuilt?
Acknowledging loss is not easy, yet the speaker in the poems expresses her loss unflinchingly, making no attempt to appear not to be angry. The anger, however, is not conveyed with the hopelessness the epigraph — “even with dry sticks I can’t get started/even with thorns”— from poet Adrienne Rich’s “Phenomenology of Anger” might suggest. In fact, Jagadakeer’s affirmation of sorrow and loss as essential ingredients of life awakens the reader to the relevance of pain to her own life and gives her the strength to confront the world — albeit one of sorrow and “bad news again.” “Show me one death that is a complete sentence” resonates with us all. Bedikian’s brilliant compositions evidence the daughter has survived.
In “When Your Mother Dies During a Pandemic” Bedikian writes: “There’s nothing sweet about loss./You embrace no one. The measurement of six feet/is your longitude and latitude and your mother/will soon be side-by-side with your dead father.” Indeed, by the time one gets to “In Lieu of an Epilogue,” part four of the five-part testimony comprising the collection, one has felt the scars forming from moving across the Atlantic. Mother’s Aleppo cannot be saved.
Nonetheless, rather than elicit hatred for this new world, that has “the nerve/to want to make things better,” the poems help the reader come face-to-face with its realities. Bedikian’s insights into the beauty of the old — the grandmother’s “a happy heart, the best medicine” — and the “hell” of the new — the woman rushed to the emergency room would have died “had she not signed/the paperwork” — expose the irony of “there’s nothing wrong, just leave/the past alone and you’ll be fine,” the mother mumbles as she cooks to survive in the one-room apartment they find in New York. The poems enlighten us about the meaning of “home.” Perhaps home is hearing the mother’s incessant “moan, the music of the old country.” Home is certainly more than the signing of paperwork and the hospital beds of the new world. It is more than “the oxygen tank and the antibiotics filling the mother’s lungs.”
“Perhaps that’s bitterness, mean/as hell,” to borrow the speaker’s words. Yet, Jagadakeer is not about, “What’s the point./It will all be over soon enough.” The persona starts to dream of sun and light again. She even contemplates a new set of MRI pictures that will show “a landslide/of healing.” But the poem that opens the collection, “Ode to Their Leaving,” has set the tone. Khalil Gibran’s inevitable “darkness” remains in the world of Jagadakeer. And it is not for lack of trying to find a balm for the body’s lesions either. As they debate their next backgammon move in a roadside cafe, in “Father dreams of Gibran,” Gibran tells the father “they are brothers . . . there is no other way of being.”
Bedikian is marvelously sensitive to the nuances of language. Her meditation on the word “dead” is worth quoting at length:
